How to Display Your Art

After you have spent several hours creating a beautiful painting or piece of art there’s one final crucial step and it is an important one:

Presentation.

There are numerous ways that you can use for presenting your work but it all depends on your own personal preferences and how you want the art to be viewed. If you want to make the step up to professional artists it is essential that you start displaying your art correctly so we put together this comprehensive list of different options:

Framing

Framing is among the most archival ways that you can use for presenting your artwork. It is a common practice in museums and galleries thanks to its high archival quality. There are several ways that artwork can be mounted and then framed. They include:

Window mounting with the simple matte boards

Box Framing

Floating Style Mounting

This is an ideal place where your local framer can aid you to select the best ways to mount your art and the best materials/ colors to use for showing off your work. You can also buy pre-made frames. In fact, this is a cost-effective option for displaying your art. You can always get a wide range of simple white, black and light wood frames in different sizes.

You can also get places that sell standard size frame and beautiful raw timber finishes that you can use to display your art. When using mattes and pre-made frames, the most critical thing is to check that they are made with all the archival materials. There’s nothing worse than making all efforts to make sure that your print is archival and then displaying it in something which contains damaging materials.

Canvas Stretching

If you’re printing your art on canvas, this is one of the most popular ways for displaying your work. It’s a very simple technique for stretching any artwork so that the canvas will wrap around the sides and it’s secured to the back of a wooden frame. It requires you to think ahead and then print your art on a large-sized canvas and not to full bleed so that the framers will have room for wrapping it around the block.

You can also choose from having white or other colored edges or just continue your art around the edges. It all depends on your own personal preferences.

Dry Mounting

You can also display your art work by simply mounting to a board/aluminum/foamcore backing without even being framed. This used to be a very popular choice a few years ago with many artists preferring this option when exhibiting their art work.

However, Dry Mounting is not really a good option for the limited edition prints because the physical print is normally adhered to the backing board using glue, and once it’s done, it can’t be reversed. Nevertheless, it still provides a clean and long lasting finish that’s capable of preventing your art from rippling in the near future.

Album and Portfolios

This is among the more basic ways for displaying your work and it’s a great option in case you have a great collection of images that you would like to keep in one place. This is also a good way for showcasing your work and then presenting the art as a portfolio. There are different options of folios and albums that you can use, including interchangeable Mylar pocket folios, self-printable inkjet albums as well as loose leave art presentation boxes.

Presentation can always make or break your art in terms of the archival integrity and ‘wow’ factor. There’s not much point in using the best and most archival materials that are available across the world today if you’ll still store your art in something which contains damaging chemicals.

Whatever you choose as your preferred option for displaying your art, just keep in mind how you want your artwork to be viewed and the kind of feel that you want to present to your viewers.

I am the founder of 9Mousai and am deeply interested in creativity and what inspires it. My main passions are writing, film and music but I have a great respect for all the arts. I'm also an animal lover and have a little cat called Winston and occasionally dabble in the odd whisky.